Daniel Olivera was wrapping up a late shift at a Victorville gas station when suddenly a single gunshot rang out and struck him in the chest.
The Arco AMPM was teeming with customers pumping gas that Sunday night — but witnesses were baffled. They said they saw no shooter as the store clerk, a young father, collapsed to the ground and died within minutes.
Olivera's killer, prosecutors say, was 140 yards away lying in a dark dirt lot, carrying out the sniper-style killing with a powerful rifle.
"He shot exactly what he was aiming for," said Alberto Juan, a San Bernardino County deputy district attorney.
Last week, a judge sentenced Eric Robbins, 38, to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the August 2013 murder, which prosecutors argued stemmed from a quarrel between Robbins and a security guard at the store less than an hour before the shooting took place.
Robbins had tried to go inside the store on Roy Rodgers Drive about 10 p.m., but was turned away by the security guard while the money inside the cash drawer was being counted, said Juan, who prosecuted the case. Robbins took off in his white pickup truck and drove to a dark lot more than a football field's length away from the gas station.
Forty minutes later, as Olivera was talking with the security guard under a bright light outside, Robbins looked down the barrel of his .308 rifle and pulled the trigger, striking 26-year-old Olivera in the chest.
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Robbins, a self-taught shooter who kept shoeboxes upon shoeboxes filled with shell casings he had saved from target practice, hit his mark, but at that distance couldn't tell the two men apart, Juan said.
"He aimed at the wrong guy and shot him, they were wearing similar clothing," Juan said. "Up until he saw the news the next day, he thinks he shot the security guard."
Surveillance video of Robbins arguing with the guard helped homicide detectives identify him as the shooter.
"There was a lot of patrons at the AMPM gas station," Juan said. "Nobody saw the shooter or anything like that."
In a statement to police, Robbins said he had gotten into a family argument earlier in the day, and the confrontation with the security guard was the tipping point, Juan said.
In April, a Victorville jury found Robbins guilty of first degree murder with the special circumstance of lying in wait. He was also found guilty of attempted murder of the security guard.
Attempts to reach Robbins' public defender for comment were unsuccessful.
Robbins does not have a military background.
Olivera, of Hesperia, was engaged to be married and a father of four, including a newborn.
"He said he would be back at 10:30, expect him at 11 and have his plate ready, and that's what I did," his fiancée Janet Cruz said at the crime scene the day after the murder. "I was looking outside the window till 2 o'clock. And he never came home, never came home."
